Walking in Space While Staying on the Ground

Posted on August 23, 2007 in Body Language Spirituality and Being

My body
Is walking in space
My soul is in orbit
With God face to face

Floating, flipping
Flying, tripping

Tripping from Pottsville to Mainline
Tripping from Mainline to Moonville

On a rocket to
The Fourth Dimension
Total self awareness
The intention

My mind is as clear as country air
I feel my flesh, all colors mesh

– Walking in Space, Hair

Recent science suggests that putting your senses out of sync with one another can take you to a place that seems other than where you are. A new technique makes it possible for people to have out of body experiences without resort to drugs or New Age thinking. Some clever wiring and placement of video cameras is all that is required:

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

I suppose that this is not recommended for people who have heart conditions.

My out of body experiences usually occur when I am in bed, coming down from a major anxiety episode. [[Xanax]] can accelerate the sensations. The top of my head feels like it separates and whirls on its own while the rest of my body turns like a suckling pig without the pain of the heat.

“the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The news may disappoint those who thought they had magical powers, but for me it just demonstrates how wondrous — in a scheming sort of way at times — the universe can be. Never ceases to amaze me how some people expect fantastic explanations when reality is so darned beguiling.

[tags]New Age, out of body experience, spirituality, brain, nervous system, body language[/tags]